Citrix Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will buy VMLogix as part of a larger push to offer more self-service tools and address concerns like vendor lock-in facing enterprises using the cloud. The news came just hours before the official start of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.

VMLogix is a provider of virtualization automation and management technologies. Citrix expects to include some of the technologies from VMLogix in its next free XenServer release, which will allow enterprise users to set up virtual services on internal computing resources in the same way they do on public clouds. Typically, public cloud providers let users order up compute services online and start using them immediately.

Citrix will also add technology from VMLogix to its Citrix OpenCloud platform so that its public-cloud-provider customers can offer lifecycle management capabilities like quality assurance and business continuity.

Citrix also plans to add new capabilities to OpenCloud that will let enterprise customers manage a mix of public and private cloud workloads from a single management console, even if they use services from different cloud providers.

The VMLogix acquisition and the updates to OpenCloud address some major cloud computing problems. “What we hear continually from corporate customers in this space is, first I want the economics and elasticity of the cloud today in my existing data center,” said Wes Wasson, chief strategy officer for Citrix. “Second I want the flexibility to move workloads as it makes sense between private and public clouds, with security and performance assured. And third I want the flexibility to change and move providers.”

“We believe this will make it easier for IT teams to build and share production-like environments on demand on their own private clouds and on public clouds, and migrate virtual workloads between production stages with a mouse click, and do that across multiple hypervisors,” said Wasson.

Citrix also reiterated its support for OpenStack, the group led by Rackspace and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that is working on open-source tools designed to make it easier for companies to work with multiple cloud providers. At VMWorld next week, Citrix will demonstrate managing workloads across XenServer machines running in an on-premise cloud and virtual machines running in a public cloud that uses OpenStack, from a single management console.

Finally, Citrix said it will add virtual switching capabilities to OpenCloud using Open vSwitch, an open-source virtual switch that supports the OpenFlow protocol. The idea is to make it easier for cloud providers to build isolated multitenant clouds while offering dynamic policies.